Upright Piano Player Read Online Free PDF

pleasure. He often said that he was surrounded by paintings that looked like the work of gifted relatives. He would have been uneasy living with art that was too obviously expensive. A Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon would have been impossible—like hanging your bank balance on the wall. Inthe same way, he could drive a Mercedes, but not a Bentley—live in Chelsea, but not Belgravia.
    There were those who saw Henry’s gradations as insincere, but his old friends were less cynical. Walter, his solicitor, and Oliver, a friend since Cambridge, knew that Henry’s dislike of pomp went back a long way. For the past thirty years, they had met every few weeks for dinner at a small Greek restaurant in Marylebone to discuss books, life, and in season, cricket. They had seen Henry poor and they had seen Henry rich, but they had never seen Henry overt.
    After their most recent get-together, Walter had called him to check that he was all right.
    “You seemed a bit down,” he said.
    Henry told himself he was wistful rather than sad. He listened to rainy afternoon jazz and the slow movements of symphonies. The empty days felt like the end of a love affair.
    In quiet desperation he turned to old routines. Even when he was married, Henry would eat breakfast out of the house, stopping off at a brasserie on his way to work. Though he no longer had an office to go to, he decided to follow the same early morning schedule. His breakfast companion had always been a book and for the most part he did read—though he also used the book as camouflage, turning the unread pages at suitable intervals as he listened in to neighboring tables. (He had known for some time that a middle-aged man sitting alone with a book is virtually invisible.)
    Most mornings he went to the brasserie in Sloane Square, which opened at 8:30 a.m. He usually arrived early and loitered in the entrance of the nearby tube station rather thanjoin the queue and be marked out as lonely, unemployed, or divorced. Though, as he ruefully admitted to himself, he was all three.
    With time to spare, he had found himself lingering over breakfast—sometimes staying for an hour or more. He was aware that he was no longer just listening to the other customers, but often staring, too. Invariably, at women. He would, if challenged, have said that his observations were innocent enough—anthropological rather than predatory. For example, he had noticed that women on greeting each other always found something to admire in the other’s appearance. “Oh that …” pointing to a necklace with a crude wooden daisy as its centerpiece—“that is adorable.” In return, the daisy lady would find the scarf that her friend was wearing “divine, a fantastic color.”
    Were they sincere? It seemed unlikely, though Henry was sure they were genuine in their wish to find something to like. Would the scarf lady have been pleased if her companion had removed the daisy necklace and offered it as a gift? He did not think so. Henry was confident that she did not actually like it. He had seen her reading a newspaper as she waited for her friend and it was clear that she still had 20/20 vision.
    On the walk back to his house, the signs of Christmas were a daily depressant. For him it was a season of greater isolation and now, deprived of even office jollity, he felt a complete outsider. Five days before Christmas, according to plan, he fled. Since the divorce, Henry had spent the holiday in Barbados. He went back to the same suite, in the same hotel, year after year, flying in and leaving one week later. He knew nothingof the island apart from what could be glimpsed from the windows of the chilled car that took him from the airport to the hotel and back again.
    His suitcase held few clothes, but was heavy with books. His great fear was of being stranded with nothing to read, so along with recent novels, he took bankers—books he knew he would enjoy reading again should the new titles disappoint.
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